Re: Cocoa To GnuStep port questions

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Monday, March 11, 2002, at 03:55 PM, Pedro Ivo Andrade Tavares wrote:

> I believe you will find on the mail archives a recent conversation 
> pointing out that classes such as NSArray are vastly faster on GNUstep 
> than on Cocoa Foundation.

I'd like to point out that that was simply reverse enumeration of an 
array, and addition of objects to another
mutable array ... the fact that this was several times faster under 
GNUstep does not really indicate anything
about overall performance of the systems.

While I'm sure that GNUstep-base is generally faster than Apple 
Foundation, the Apple compiler/runtime uses some
hand crafted assembler to speed up method despatch ... and this tends to 
compensate for poor optimisation elsewhere.
Even so, the only area I've ever benchmarked where GNUstep is not faster 
is NSNotificationCentre, where I was unable
to optimise to beat the Apple implementation ... though I did get 
GNUstep to within a couple of percent of its speed.

I'm almost certain the GNUstep gui library is slower than the Apple 
version ... it's much less mature software and
is unoptimised in very many places.  There is no fundamental reason why 
this should not change though - I think it's
just a matter of time.